1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of culture plates. More particularly, the invention is concerned with a culture plate apparatus including culture wells arranged in a cluster with a moat surrounding the cluster and including a cover for enclosing the wells and the moat with a head space therebetween. By filling the moat with water or buffer solution, the moat maintains temperature uniformity among the wells and maintains uniform humidity in the head space thereby preventing nonuniform evaporation from the wells while reducing evaporation overall.
2. Description of the Prior Art
In the prior art, tissue culture plates having a plurality of wells are used for biological culturing. A typical culture plate is known as tissue culture cluster dish and includes 96 wells arranged in a rectangular cluster of eight rows (designated A through H) of twelve wells (designated 1 through 12). A cover fits over the tray and encloses the tops of the wells. Similar cluster dishes are arranged in groups of six, twelve, twenty-four or forty-eight wells, respectively.
One of the problems with prior art culture trays is the evaporation of water from tissue culture medium placed in the wells. This problem is most noted over extended culturing periods and particularly acute for those wells around the periphery of the cluster.
A common way of coping with this evaporation problem is to fill the peripheral wells (36 in number) with water or buffer solution and use only the inner 60 wells for experimentation. The effect is a loss of over one third (36 of 96) of the available wells for experimentation which in turn requires the use of more trays and additional labor and time.
Another problem with prior art culture trays is sometimes temperature variations among the wells affects experimental results. Again, this problem is particularly acute with the wells around the periphery of the cluster.